Radbraken. This is how it works: you tie someone to a sturdy cartwheel, then break all his or her bones by beating them country-wide with cudgels, after which you braid the mangled limbs around the spokes of the wheel. It is essential that the punished person undergoes all this alive and conscious. After the treatment, you take the wheel with the still living and thinking human flesh attached to it to a spot outside the city, where it takes about four days to die. The method was developed by the Dutch, and in our former colony of the Dutch East Indies, it was a common punishment for slaves who had accidentally walked on a pavement.
More than a million slaves 'we' consumed in Indonesia, between the time the Dutch founded the colony and the time slavery was officially abolished. Pity about a nice trade, of course, because in the early days a slave fetched 1,600 euros (converted), while you could buy them on the slave market in Bengal for five tens.
And all in the country we like to think back to as a land of caring natives and not too bad colonials, who fathered a rich progeny of bastard princes and princesses. Those who now adorn themselves with the honourific name 'indo' are all descendants of the slaves the Dutch wore out in the East. So says Reggie Baay, author of 'Daar werd wat gruwelijks verricht', a book about our forgotten slavery past in the Dutch East Indies.
Baay has written a book that will forever change our perception of that colonial past. He was handed the first copy at the beginning of his lecture at Writers Unlimited 2015, and I am still a little devastated by the superior composure with which Baay now talks about the horrors he discovered in his research for the book. Something gruesome was done there. The book is on sale now.
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